Semalt Suggests The Best Web Page Scraper To Consider

Selenium is an open-source automated testing suite for web applications that are used on different platforms and browsers. Selenium offers infrastructure for the W3C WebDriver specification, a programming interface that is compatible with web browsers. This software comprises of various libraries and tools that enable web browser automation.

Why Selenium software?

Selenium software focuses on web-based automated application to extract data from a web page. This software comprises of a suite of software designed to meet your web scraping specifications. Selenium software has four major components to consider.

WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver was designed to offer a simple programming interface. If you are working on scraping a dynamic web page, Selenium-WebDriver is the component to consider. This tool supports web data extraction on web pages where content can change without necessarily reloading the page.

WebDriver supplies an object-oriented Application Programming Interface (API) that offers advanced support for web testing and scraping. The tool works by making calls to the browser using the overall support for automation.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid is widely used in distributing texts over more than one virtual machine. In simple words, Selenium Grid enables you to run your tests on different virtual machines against more than one browser. The grid allows you to run scraping in a distributed execution environment.

Time is a significant factor when it comes to web scraping. It has never been easy to scrape a dynamic web page. Scrape this page by speeding up your tasks execution. You can do this by running multiple tests at the same time. The best thing about using Selenium is the fact that you can operate a grid of the same browser, version, and type.

Selenium Remote Control (RC)

Are you working on scraping JavaScript-enabled browsers? Selenium Remote Control is the tool to consider. This tool allows you to write automated applications tests in your preferred programming language.

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Selenium IDE is a script that works as a Firefox extension that allows you to edit, record, and debug data. For starters, Selenium IDE records and plays end-user interactions with Firefox browser.

Selenium software is compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3. If you are working on compiling the Internet Explorer driver, you'll need 32 and 64-bit cross-compilers and Visual Studio 2008. Familiarity with Ruby 2 is an added advantage.

Scraping web pages with Selenium

With Selenium, you can efficiently interact with JavaScript web forms. Install a WebDriver on your machine and find the form using XPath. Using Selenium, select your preferred option by clicking the drop-down menu and give your browser some minutes to load before you click on the next element.

Your target-page will display scraped data after all the forms are correctly filled out. Some web pages take time before loading content. To scrape this type of page, loop through all your drop-down options, which are contained under specific web forms. It is important to note that Selenium software is compatible with Windows Operating System, Mac OS, and Linux. Ease your web page scraping with Selenium software.